The world through a dirty glass.

I wish I could really communicate the dream feeling. I'll try to describe the view of it from my minds' eye. The view accompanies the feeling; that's the only way I can even begin to approach the actual sending of the feeling from my cloud of thoughts to yours.

Ok. This is naturally somewhat abstract, but there are recognizable elements familiar to everyone - the elements are like words that form the grammar of the sentence which describes it. The dream feeling. The derealization phenomenon. Here goes:

Firstly, imagine that everything I'm about to describe is taking place behind a window, or a screen. A glass screen... like a TV screen. It's the language of it, I suppose. The phonetics are in color; a palette that tends toward yellow-beige-gray, with reddish-purple hints where there are shadows, or things of a darker shade. The glass screen is smeared and dirty, and everything visible beyond that glass has a smeared and dirty accent. A profoundly decrepit and unconcerned ignorance.

It's like looking outside through the large front window of a small town laundromat, or a gas station. I mean a real gas station, not a convenience store. Think thirty or forty years ago, if you have memories that go back that far.

So, if you're able to get a picture of that in your mind, and you can speak a description of it to yourself using that visual grammar, then all you have to do is stain it with a couple of coats of apathy, coat it with a layer of old dust, put it inside of a dry, still late summer afternoon, and then name it 'Eternal Evening, 7:30 PM, and Old'.

Ok, that's the predicate. Now let's form the subject - and here's where I'm pretty sure the communication falters, because what you see through that window has to be very personal.

Everything I've described so far is the womb, but it's the movement inside that makes it a thing impossible to express, but which I can't ignore. Because it's MY feeling, a singular feeling that comes from a deepness inside of me that nurtures a painful but comforting kind of discord, surrounded by a melody consisting solely of minor diminishments that are just slightly out of tune, and only barely audible.

I'll give you mine.

When I look through that window, there's no motion. Not even a slight breeze to stir up the dust and dirt; and there is a dirtiness everywhere, and on everything. There's life out there, but it's a still life. People are out there. Sitting still, mostly.

Sometimes that window provides a view out onto a porch; hot and splintered and dead. Sometimes it's the laundromat window, looking out onto a few yards of cracked concrete desolation, with weeds stuck in the cracks.

Looking outside, through the backseat window, I can feel sticky bare thighs on a hot vinyl surface.

There's a horizontal view of the world through that dirty glass, tipped vertically and with an earful of dirt, and a darkness underneath a flat and protesting deadness of wood that's nailed to itself and sharing its splinters, punctuated by cinder blocks and clods of dry earth which sprouts gray weeds; all dead.

Underneath and permeating it all, there's a living satisfaction, imbedded inside of and agreeing with the view of the world, and the dry, dessicated smell of it. The essence of it is captured like a still frame that was left out and overdeveloped, in mid-rot.

The sum total is extremely unsettling, but it's what the experience of living inside of the world feels like to me, sometimes.